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Vegetable Marrow Soup
(England.) Vegetable marrow is a species of squash, and the latter is a good substitute. Peel and slice a large squash; fry it in 2 ounces butter, with salt, pepper, and 4 ounces of flour. Add 1 quart of milk and 1 pint of strong veal or chicken stock, some parsley, onion, and a carrot. Cook for 1 hour, press through a sieve, add a pinch of sugar, a tablespoonful of butter, and serve with croutons.
A plain English purée soup built on a very heavy roux. The proportions work, but the flour and the milk both need watching.
- The marrow itselfVegetable marrow is a summer squash of the same species as zucchini (Cucurbita pepo), grown on to full size and pale and watery when mature. Roughly two pounds of peeled, seeded pattypan, yellow squash or overgrown zucchini stands in well for the recipe's "large squash"; winter squash is sweeter and denser and will change the character of the soup.
- Four ounces of flour is a lotThat is close to a cup against 2 ounces (4 tablespoons) of butter, so it is not a balanced roux — it is flour dusted over frying squash to thicken three pints of liquid. Expect a thick, almost velouté-like soup. Cut the flour to 2 ounces if you want something you can drink from a cup.
- Add the liquid off the heatWith that much flour, pouring in a quart of milk all at once over a hot pan guarantees lumps. Draw the pan off, add the stock first and work it smooth, then the milk, then return to a bare simmer.
- The hour is at a simmer, not a boilA milk-heavy soup with flour in it will catch and scorch on the bottom of a thin pan. Use a heavy pot, keep it barely trembling, and stir the base every few minutes. Forty minutes is usually enough for the squash to collapse.
- Aromatics go in whole and come outThe parsley, onion and carrot are there for flavour, not body — an onion halved, a carrot in chunks, a few parsley stalks. They will go through the sieve with everything else if you leave them, which is acceptable but will colour the soup.
- SievingPressing through a sieve was the standard route to smoothness in a kitchen of this period. A blender or stick blender does it in seconds; a pass through a fine sieve afterwards still improves the texture.
- The sugar and the finishing butterThe pinch of sugar corrects marrow's flatness rather than sweetening it, and the tablespoon of butter stirred in off the heat at the end is what gives the soup its gloss. Neither is optional if you want it to taste like the original.
- YieldRoughly three pints of finished soup, serving six as a first course. The recipe does not specify how the croutons are made; frying in butter was the usual treatment of the period.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a genre of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks that collected dishes country by country, and the parenthetical "(England.)" here is doing the work of a whole headnote: this is offered as a specimen of English cookery rather than as a recipe an American household would already know. The vegetable marrow is the reason for the label. It was a fixture of English kitchen gardens and allotments — a summer squash deliberately grown on to full size, mild to the point of blandness, valued for bulk and for the gardener's satisfaction of raising something enormous — and it never took hold in the same way in the United States, hence the compiler's immediate note that squash will do. The soup itself is a straightforward white purée soup of the period, thickened with a flour-and-butter base and enriched with milk and veal stock, a formula applied more or less unchanged across dozens of vegetables in the cookery books of the 1880s and 1890s.